can we design organizations for beauty?

Can we design organizations for

beauty? @joyce_hostyn

orc / mordor/ sarumon’s dark place

“They could NOT

make beautiful things.”

We aren’t Orcs (even though sometimes we act like it)

…shareholder value is the dumbest

idea in the world. Shareholder value is

a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees,

your customers and your products.

Jack Welch

They could NOT

make beautiful things.

we need a new narrative for business

Why is the language of business so sterile, so uninspiring and so relentlessly banal?... Customers, investors, taxpayers and policymakers believe there’s a hole in the soul of business. The only way for managers to change this fact, and regain the moral high ground, is to embrace what Socrates called the

good, the just and the beautiful. Gary Hamel

“Never has there been a more exciting

time for all of us to explore this next great

frontier where the boundaries between

work and higher purpose are merging into one, where doing good really is good for

business.”

1.  Build sports car 2.  Use that money to build an affordable car 3.  Use that money to build an even more

affordable car 4.  While doing above, also provide zero-

emission electric-power generation options

Here's to creating the greatest car company of the 21st century, and to

making a real difference in the

world, and to moving us off fucking oil as

fast as possible. Elon Musk, Tesla

When I say ‘fool,’ I am

talking about a company that

embraces unconventional

wisdom. Tom Gardner

Bridge has the potential to create a minimum standard of education for every child in the world that is much higher than it

is today. Hands-down, it is the most innovative company in the education space at the base of the pyramid and has created a model that will be studied and

replicated by organizations across the world. I will be sad to

leave, but I am optimistic that the company will change the

world. Josh Weinstein

Handmade School in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, Architects: Anna Heringer, Eike Roswag

“beautiful, meaningful

and humane…”

the beautiful

places we call beautiful are… the work

of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate

themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity

to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into

logical plans – a combination that enables them to create

environments that satisfy needs we never consciously

new we even had. Alain de Botton

Stefano Boeri’s Urban Vertical Forest: Bosco Verticale

people at the center

Procter & Gamble Olympics Mother's Day Ad

powered by purpose

product of deep integrity

values-centered

elegantly crafted

loving of all stakeholders

WikiPearl™ draws inspiration from the magic of grape skins to eliminate plastic from foods and beverages. Revolutionary and delicious, WikiPearl™ is triply good

-- good for the planet, good for you, and just plain good.

sustainably good

community-centric

emotionally resonate

Now we look at prosthetics and don’t think of

them just as technology solutions, but think of the

problem of a missing limb and whether there is a way to incorporate design and the

arts and human emotion into the solution. It invites us to

see problems and solutions in an entirely different light.

Scott Summit, Bespoke Innovations

empowering heroes

building connection

The Born Friends Family Portrait , by Skype, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nRKyQ11494

delivering a promise of happiness

illustration by Sunni Brown, Delivering Happiness

I love Apple. I use multiple Apple products every day. I get excited to walk into Apple’s

candy colored immaculate stores. I walk through the different sections enamored with each product. I could spend hours exploring

each product’s nuances. Surprisingly enough though, my love of all things Apple

wasn’t love at first sight; it was more like a seed planted that slowly grew… My love of

all things Apple will continue to grow. I know this because the company is always

reinventing its products in a way that makes the coolest thing you own even cooler!

Erin Vogelsanger

forging lasting relationships

turning impossible into possible

Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things

the way our minds have

instructed our eyes to see.

Muhammad Yunus

making the world a better place

Question for the Blue Monster Crowd: “Who owns the soul of Microsoft? Hugh McLeod

To call a work of architecture or design beautiful is to recognize it as a rendition of values critical to our flourishing. Alain de Botton

business can be a terrible force for

evil�

 The very essence of capitalism is under threat as business is

now seen as a personal wealth accumulator. We have to bring this world back to sanity and put

the greater good ahead of self-interest.

Paul Polman CEO of Unilever

or an incredible force for

good�

We owe our existence to innovation. We owe

our prosperity to innovation… We owe our

future to innovation… Innovation isn’t a fad –

it’s the real deal, the only deal. our future no less than our past depends

on innovation. Gary Hamel

capitalism needs a brain

and a soul Nancy Koehn

for it’s the

soul of business that keeps us

moving forward as a society

Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital is unlike any hospital in

the nation. We believe in a comprehensive health

care experience that includes mind, body

and spirit as essential elements in the healing

process.

Sanitary napkins produced in a “Small is Beautiful” model

can deliver livelihood, hygiene and dignity to poor women, and help them strengthen

society.

A. Muruganandam

…if we put customers first, other stakeholders will also benefit, as long as they’re willing to take

the long-term view. And a long-term approach is essential for invention,

because you’re going to have a lot of failures along

the way.

Jeff Bezos

What is your organization saying?

with its public space

with its employee space

Wish You Worked Here: Beautiful, Productive Office Spaces, HBR

with its communications

beautiful information

reduces violence by

50%

with its information

with its meetings

with its behaviours

The world we see around us, countries and continents, have

been built on the back of these signatures. The

future too will be written on these

signatures. Signatures of employees... Truth is,

every employee is a hero.

with its employee experience

How to make your business a

better version of

itself. Hugh McLeod

with its language

with its stories

The Scarecrow, Chipolte www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUtnas5ScSE

“Imagine your organization powered by

technology that's beautiful, easy-to-

use, and designed to speed performance.

Beauty as core competence drives

Infor's UX”

with its products

intranet can be beautiful

… ‘beauty’ is not just about what it looks like, but in

how it works, allowing

employees to share knowledge…

Beautiful Intranets

with its employee apps

with its innovations

This is one of the most beautiful things I know. It's a plastic bag. And

when I looked at it first, I thought, no, there's no beauty in that. Then I

found out… if I put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with

coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff, that that filthy

water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up

inside it as pure, potable drinking water. And all of a

sudden, this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me.

Richard Seymour, How Beauty Feels

with its packaging

because the presentation was

so lovely that I felt like I was

being sent a gift to say thank you for supporting

Who Made Your Pants

with its footprint

with its user experience

… it'll begin "learning" immediately. Over the next seven days, Nest will collect data about

the way you adjust your heating or cooling, and only then will it begin

giving you smart feedback to help you

conserve energy.

through its service

with its service experience

signaling its empathy

Beauty requires us to think in new ways

image by Medi Belortaja

It’s impossible to develop new

styles of organization and

management while continuing

to think in old ways.

Gareth Morgan

Without a deeply felt – and a powerfully lived – sense of meaning, every business will devolve to what the investment banks became: machines engineered with relentless precision to destroy long-run value, often implosively so. Umair Haque

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question. e.e. cummings

Today’s users are experiencing a renaissance of user-centric consumer software— beautiful, engaging, and easy-to-use applications such as Flipboard℠, Instagram℠, Mint.com, and Facebook. With this in mind, Infor created Hook & Loop, an internal creative think tank made up of more than 50 designers, information architects, and creative storytellers, all focused on creating the next generation of business applications for the next generation of business application users.

“At our core is the eternal question—

what if? What if business applications

were agile? What if they were social? What

if they were beautiful? What if

people worked the way they live?”

What if you imagined the kind of city in which you’d like to live, and then designed a car for this ideal place?

amorebeautifulquestion.com

Can organizations be beautiful? Can organizational designs be beautiful? Is there a ‘designerly-ness’ to the process of organizational design?

Are there overarching design concepts that can be described as beautiful? I think Shaker communities might be considered beautiful, not just because they created beautiful things but because of the simplicity of structure, clarity of purpose and thoughtfulness for every aspect of the experience. Tim Brown, IDEO

what if? �… leaders embraced truth, beauty and goodness as ideals worth striving for?

… organizations mentored employees in designing the story of their life’s work ?

… you imagined the kind of business that could win a Noble peace prize, and then designed it?

… organizations were designed as epic narratives?

how might we? �… design organizations for beauty?

… architect organizations for happiness?

… make empathy an organizational core competency?

… craft organizations as creative forces for positive change in their communities?

The Connected Company, Dave Gray

Tomorrow’s management systems

must give as much credence to such

timeless human ideals as beauty, justice,

community as they do to the traditional goals

of efficiency, advantage, and profit.

Gary Hamel

image by Michael Chimero

is it beautiful?

… if the solution is

not beautiful, I know it is

wrong. Buckminster

Fuller

And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot

reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the

work of all three. And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When people talk about new forms of capitalism, this is what I have in mind: companies that show, in all transparency, that they are contributing to society, now and for many generations to come… Success will require courageous leadership. We will need companies that are prepared to march in the vanguard and pioneer new ways of working and build new business models. By doing so they will rebuild trust in business and, I am sure, grow profitably. Paul Polman, CEO Unilver

Being good in business is the

most fascinating kind of art. Making

money is art and working is art and good business is

the best art. Andy Warhol

what is beautiful is loved

be an artist, an architect, a designer of beauty